Visual Art

A video based on the Pictures at an Exhibition by the Russian composer Modeste Mussorgsky. With a duration of 30 minutes, it offers an unusual musical journey through Belgium which offers a faithful and / or iconoclastic proofreading of this famous score!

Opening Wednesday, June 29, 6:30 pm – 9 pm @ Museum of Ixelles (Rue Jean Van Volsem 71, 1050 Elsene), as part of the collective exhibit RIEN NE VAS PLUS! Organized by Juan d’Oultremont. The exhibition will be held from 29 June to 25 September 2016.

This art work is a “Musical Video Poem” inspired by the music « Pictures at an exhibition » by Modest Mussorgsky (Russian composer, 1839-1881) and the paintings of the artist Hartman of which Mussorgsky was inspired to compose his work. The process is an ellipsis. Indeed, the musical composition of Mussorgsky is the setting of music of a series of pictures/paintings. The artist Porsperger let himself inspired by the music to produce a series of videos. The locations of shooting are inspired by paintings and / or titles of each piece. It is about putting in dialogue the music and many contemporary realities. The aim is to travel with a record player and create a series of performative mini-concerts in contemporary locations, the final video being the result of an archive of all these performative concerts. An epic journey, strewn with dangers, unusual places, declining the current human world and the environment that surrounds it. Through the various captures, the record player seems to adopt different characters: heroic, contemplative, diabolical, ecstatic, curious, in danger … The sound of the video is the capture of the sound emitted by the turntable itself during the recording mixed live with the environmental sound of the place. The way of filming is by this way directly influenced by music and the sound archiving is faithful to the reality of the concert. The work is seen as a painting, does not look like a narrative video but rather a succession of landscape visions but also as a study on the influence of the image on the music and vice versa. The device is as follows: a turntable is fixed on a movable support to which a camera is attached. Like that while the turntable is travelling, the subjective look of the camera remains unchanged throughout the duration of the video. The result is a video of 30 minutes, the original duration of the musical work, declined in 15 video portraits combining 4 musical versions according to the chosen scenes: orchestral version, piano version, electronic version (Tomita) and progressive rock version (Emerson Lake & Palmer).

This work questions how, from banal visual elements, the power of music is capable to change its perception and reveal its multiple stories. A study based on hazard related on how music influences image and how image influences music as well how ordinary elements of life tells stories by being plunged in a music dramaturgy.A study of how a loop of the famous Tchaikovsky’s Flower Waltz can change the perception of reality.

How throughout music, commonplaces reveals another storyThis Tchaikovsky’s Waltz contains brilliant and festive passages as well as dramatic nostalgia.How a bucolic sweet landscapes becomes dramaticHow some melancholic grey clouds take over a festive look thanks the sound of a Waltz, synonymous of festive celebration